New cable modem = new speed

[Quattro Pete]

This is hardly news-worthy, but maybe someone will find it useful.

For the past few months I've been experiencing much lower than advertized d/l speeds on my Comcast HSI. After speaking to Comcast CS, which said that everything is fine and dandy on their side and tweaking some of my TCP/IP settings (RWIN), I was still barely getting half the speed that I should have been getting (3 Mbps vs 6 Mbps).

Finally after some advice on another forum I swapped out the cable modem. My previous one was an old(er) Motorola SB4200 (DOCSIS 1.0), but it used to run at around 6 Mbps in the past, so I didn't think it was the source of the problem. But apparently it was. I bought a Linksys BEFCMU10 (DOCSIS 2.0), and I'm back to 6-7 Mbps d/l speeds.

BTW, there's a $20 MIR on it until the end of the month, in case anyone is interested.

 

[Pablo]

Right on. I had the same thing with my crapposis modem.

I'm using Win 2000 and I notice over the days it will get progressively slower download speeds, rebooting modem and PC helps a bit - but I have a utility that cleans out some junk and redoes the settings and whammo speedy again.

 

[Volvohead]

Unless you rent one of theirs, you're generally on your own to keep up with the cable provider's standards. Since most folks keep their own until they malfunction, I imagine there are a lot of folks out there blissfully ignorant that all they're getting is 3mb service.

Most of Comcast up here is now on the 1.1 standard, which is needed for the highest speeds and the free "speedboost" (not that you always get it even with 1.1). They'll still carry your 1.0 device till the cows come home. But as you learned, you're only getting half the bandwidth you paid for.

There were rumors that Comcast was going to Docsis 3.0 down the road, but it more and more looks like the next step will be 2.0. Most all of the newest modems should be fine for that.

It could be worse. I just had to dump a really beautiful Matrox P-series card because many new applications now demand fully DirectX 9.0 compliant video cards to function. And I can tell you, these new two slot, mega-3d powerhouses don't look nearly as good the other 99% of the time.